Form x Function: The Tumbler

Does it come in black?

The burly gent, known by day as Bruce Wayne and by night as the Batman (or occasionally as “ITS DA BAT”), has had many live-action incarnations over the years.

These range from the aggressively camp…

(This low res gif is all you deserve, Adam West)

To literally-me tier emo;

(He looks vexed because there’s something in his way)

To the suave and oddly well-adjusted.

Then there’s also Michael Keaton, Ben Affleck, Val Kilmer and George Clooney’s takes on Batman but because I either haven’t seen the films they’re in or, where I have, they’re so aggressively pony I’m not going to waste valuable time talking about them.

But seriously though, who keeps giving Zack Snyder money to make his cinematic abortions?

Enough about Snyder.

Anyone even loosely familiar with the Batman mythos knows that along with a loyal British butler, a cave with bats and occasionally a scale model of a dinosaur in and a traumatised orphan made to dress in red with green hot pants, Batman needs a Batmobile to drive.

These themselves come in many forms as diverse as the handsome rich white men playing Batman. These range from the 1940s, when Batman just drove around in a normal car (I shit you not, they made him drive a convertible Cadillac), to the two-seater Adam West mobile (the extra seat needed for the previously mentioned orphan in hot pants), through to the most recent Battinson muscle car variant, designed by the legendary Ash Thorp who you really should should check out here.

However there is one iteration that dunks on all the others like it’s 1990s Michael Jordan on anabolic steriods and that would be the Tumbler from Christoper Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy of films.

Some of you might say: “but Ben, aren’t you just looking at this with nostalgia-tinted glasses because those films came out when you were an impressionable teenager?”

And like, shut up. It’s obviously fucking dope or I wouldn’t have spent all that time and money building a Lego one.

C’mon, look at it. It fucks.

For those who have read Frank Miller’s seminal Dark Knight Returns, it’s not hard to see where Nolan and award-winning production designer Nathan Crowley got their inspiration from. According to Nolan he was after something somewhere between a Lamborgini and a Hummer, with a large side helping of sick as fuck.

While the story of how Crowley kitbashed (it’s a nerd term, look it up) the initial model of the Tumbler together, and how his team subsequently built four actual full size Tumblers is genuinely impressive, it pales in comparison to how epic the fucking thing is on screen.

It goes fast, it jumps rooftops, it has a sick rocket engine, makes an epic roaring engine noise (which is actually slightly eclipsed by the sound design on the Matt Reeves Batmobile if I’m honest), it fires explosive rounds, it saves Katie Holmes, Commissioner Gordon, Gotham city and, finally, it also turns into an equally epic motorbike after taking an RPG to the flank.

If I was a billionaire whose idea of resolving trauma was punching street-level thugs in the face (and who also runs the charitiable Wayne Foundation for addressing socio-ecomonic issues), the I too would be driving the Tumbler as my primary whip.

In fact, if you are a billionaire with a serious case of mid-life crisis, you can actually buy yourself a limited edition Tumbler here for the cool price of $2,999,000.

Or alternatively you can give me the money and I’ll drive it to Marks and Spencer.

Until then I’ll just keep basking in the reflected glory of my 2048-piece Lego Tumbler.

Glorious.